


Fire to Fire, and Spaces Between

by ParadifeLoft



Category: Dark Souls I
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Metaphysics, Pyromancy, Referenced repeated character death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-10
Updated: 2017-07-10
Packaged: 2018-11-30 02:58:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,230
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11454564
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ParadifeLoft/pseuds/ParadifeLoft
Summary: A chosen Undead descends through Blighttown. Lordran does not merely passively observe, nor is it uninfluenced in turn.





	Fire to Fire, and Spaces Between

**Author's Note:**

> This is sort of a mixture of a whole bunch of different sources of inspiration - my own experience as a player in Blighttown, a friend talking (unrelatedly) about repeated character death as a fic trope, and a fair good bit of lore discussion and theorizing. All rolled up into some emergent property-esque prose!
> 
> Low on actual events or action, high on atmosphere and metaphysical exploration as filtered through culture. Which is basically what the tags said, yes?

Fire crackled and flickered its slowly shifting patterns of light against the bridge’s walls, and she felt its warmth, soft against her withered hand, as ripples of consciousness began to return.

Slowly, Anvha pushed herself up and sat, with a bit of gingerness so as to gently meet new injuries rather than throw herself into them unawares. Humanity in the fire knit the wear of undeath even as her retinas adjusted to light: the peculiar knife’s edge between cavern dimness and weak sun from past the walls. In the distance, the sounds of low rustling movement and drips of water draining down from the sewers kept the place’s ever-present company.

She stood after a time, once her perceptions felt clear enough, her body once again amenable to movement thanks to the flame’s rejuvenation. Back down again the way she’d came, then, and preferably not getting killed again for quite a while.

What had it been this most recent time that did it? A fall? She could remember, dimly, a thrust of a sword, a step too far and a plummet, dizzying and sudden past stretches of rickety wood platforms with panic clutching anticipatory at her throat… but was that just now, or had it been earlier? Other memories suggested themselves: impalement and shock and crumpling limbs; a thing that had once been a man closing jaws about her neck as she thrashed... The climbs and descents were starting a bit to blur, and dwelling on them was hardly pleasant. The voice of the man at Firelink echoed in her ears, mocking. _Only one more, but it’s going to be_ suicide _…._

She’d snorted with disdain and irritation when he’d said it first. What’s suicide when you’re already dead? She’d get back up, again, and again, just as she had in the city. What else was the point of being undead, after all, and it wasn’t as if she had anything better to do than ring these stupid bells, just to say she _could_. All she’d wanted was to get out of that damned prison, and instead of the world she knew, she’d ended up carried off here. Might as well do _something_ with it to pass the time, especially since everyone else about here seemed too witless or cowardly to manage the task in the first place.

Mm, but she was getting lost in her thoughts again, and that was how she’d just died after all, so better to focus on that very task she’d assigned herself for the moment, wasn’t it. In places the ladders felt like they were half rotted, and some of the platforms in this labyrinth weren’t much better - damp and squishy to the touch when she forgot to grip a different part of the beam or tread just so, ready to dump her flat on her back below if not worse -

\- wait, no, she hadn’t just died from distraction, she realised. Belatedly. Why had she thought that? Sure, she’d been run straight through a couple times before, surprised when she shouldn’t have been through her own carelessness, but this time most recently was a fall. Wasn’t it? Now a flash of doubt gripped her, that perhaps she was remembering wrong even still. Stepping back, she crouched down and leaned against the wall solid behind her, sickly in the reflected torchlight. Needed to stop, wait, take a moment to sort things out, get out from this tangle of confusion like so much dark-shrouded foliage. And yet… why was it so important that she be able to remember all her deaths in order, though? Did it truly matter? They’d happened, and she’d gone on anyway, and now she was here and that was the point, wasn’t it…

No. No. A small flare of clarity brightened and animated her like a flame from deep below the surface. This was how people went hollow, losing care for sense and knowledge and time - and whatever they said about her face, she was no hollow.

Perhaps the deaths were not important in themselves, but being stuck back in memories of experiences from days ago, weeks, months - well, it was hard exactly to say in this land, but still - it was barely a step above repeating those actions in the flesh, _without_ a mind to them. And once you stopped caring about time, how long before you started to forget what you were doing _now_? She shuddered to think of herself, reduced to some bulbous mutant, destroying its own scant things and waving corpses around instead of weapons. What was staring straight at death, unpleasant as it was, compared to that?

So she fixed the images in her mind, clear, determined. A fall. And she even now neared the place where it had happened, she noticed; the ripples of rock and tangled structures of wood bearing a new familiarity and emotion that she might otherwise have ignored. Tension crept unwanted into her posture with that recognition - _that would be a good way to die, wouldn’t it_ , she thought savagely, before forcing herself to relax, and letting flame twine around her fingers to prepare for what might next lie in wait.

Indeed, she was ready for the ambush as she hadn’t been when she died, dancing around the hulking creature to put her back to the wall this time, rather than open space. It swung wildly over where she’d been, and then she was letting the fire slip from her hand, into a searing conflagration that felled her opponent in a heap of charred flesh.

Not the most pleasant use of the world’s fundamental substance, but it beat all the other options.

And now, as she descended further, the smells of myriad fetid, rotting, living, dying things drifting up from the swamp below, she could almost feel something of the fire reassuring her: it was no anathema. For fire to bring only life was far worse.

That intuition, certain as it settled in her, did not quite feel like just her own. Which was curious in itself; she was so used to the inviolability of her own mind, and to the harsh wall of separation between her own certainties and those of others around her, different at best and deadly at worst. But the descent had found her feeling stranger than usual overall; more at home in these surroundings, repulsive as they largely were. Less… alone, apart, somehow.

Perhaps it was the fumes, she thought with a short laugh. Anvha never _had_ been in a swamp before, despite the particular talents that seemed to come to her more easily than prayer. Perhaps this was the ordinary state of such a place, and a part, for that matter, of what Laurentius had said about advanced civilization. Boundaries between people being a bit less rigid, when the work of flames was all around you. Even simply speaking with him had felt like a piece of her finding some small home, and now, to compare the lurking sprawl of power, heavy and stagnant beneath her… how difficult to imagine such a thing, before feeling it oneself.

Time and civilization indeed seemed to slip further out of reach along with the boundaries of souls here. Not so bad a feeling as how it had happened up above, when it was dissolving instead of becoming…

Still, best not to linger too intently. The only way to go was down.


End file.
